The Moral Case For Liberty
Some analysts put the ‘Golden Rule’ at the heart of ethics, saying ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ But it has its problems. Someone with a bad leg might want others to help them upstairs, but be themselves incapable of doing the same to others. I might help a blind person across the road, but I don’t want anyone to do that for me.
Far more valid is the negative of that Golden Rule: ‘Do not do unto others what you do not want done to yourselves.’ I don’t want others to injure me or to take my stuff, so I don’t do that to them. The price for protecting myself, my space and my things is that I behave in ways that give others the same protection from me. It is an unwritten contract that we each behave in ways that don’t abuse each other.
It has turned out in practice that nations that embrace liberty have been more successful economically. Allowing people the freedom to make choices over what to buy, where to work, what to invest in, have gained far more wealth and prosperity than have nations that do not. Socialism has destroyed wealth wherever it has been tried. Freedom and free markets have gained it. East and West Germany illustrated the gap formerly, and North and South Korea do it today. People did not flee into East Germany then or into North Korea today, and there are not hordes on the borders of Venezuela struggling to get in. China became prosperous only after it abandoned economic socialism and embraced economic capitalism.
Some think it is a fortunate coincidence that freedom, good for moral reasons, should also deliver the goods. It has given those of us who embrace it for philosophical reasons the additional argument that it delivers better living standards in practice.
This is not a coincidence. It is the most efficient system because it is the most moral. When we allow people the freedom to make economic decisions, they make decisions about where to allocate their resources to improve their lives’ circumstances. As Adam Smith said,
“The uniform, constant, and uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition . . . is frequently powerful enough to maintain the natural progress of things toward improvement, in spite both of the extravagance of government, and of the greatest errors of administration.”
When people have the liberty to make their choices, they do so in the most efficient ways they can. This is what makes the free societies the most prosperous ones.